These are the questions at the heart of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses died and living memory was fading.

[1] Schlink's book was well received in his native country and elsewhere, winning several awards; Der Spiegel wrote that it was one of the greatest triumphs of German literature since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959).

They develop a practice of bathing and having sex, before which she frequently has him read aloud to her, especially classical literature, such as The Odyssey and Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog.

The distance between them had been growing as Michael had been spending more time with his school friends; he feels guilty and believes it was something he did that caused her departure.

Six years later, while attending law school, Michael is part of a group of students observing a war crimes trial.

The incident was chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who emigrated to the United States after the war; she is the main prosecution witness at the trial.

He feels guilty for having loved a remorseless criminal and at the same time is mystified at Hanna's willingness to accept full responsibility for supervising the other guards despite evidence proving otherwise.

This explains many of Hanna's actions: her refusal of the promotion that would have removed her from the responsibility of supervising these women and also the fear she carried her entire life of being discovered.

After much deliberation, he chooses not to reveal her secret for fear of making her situation worse, as their relationship was a forbidden one because he was a minor at the time.

Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps.

While in the U.S., Michael travels to New York to visit the Jewish woman who was a witness at the trial, and who wrote the book about the winter death march from Auschwitz.

The woman understands, but nonetheless refuses to take the savings Hanna had asked Michael to convey to her, saying, "Using it for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like an absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant."

"[4] His "clear and unadorned language enhances the authenticity of the text," according to S. Lillian Kremer, and the short chapters and streamlined plot recall detective novels and increase the realism.

"[6] For his cohorts, there was the unique position of being blameless and the sense of duty to call to account their parents' generation: … [which] had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from their midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame … We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst … The more horrible the events about which we read and heard, the more certain we became of our responsibility to enlighten and accuse.

"[9] This idea plays itself out in the scene where the student Michael hitchhikes to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp site during the trial, to get what he hopes will be some sense of the place.

The driver who picks him up is an older man who questions him closely about what he believes motivated those who carried out the killings, then offers an answer of his own: An executioner is not under orders.

[11] Germany had the highest literacy rate in Europe; Franklin suggests that Hanna's illiteracy represented the ignorance that allowed ordinary people to commit atrocities.

"The paralyzing shame, the psychic numbing, the moral failures of the 'lucky late-born' are the novel's central focus," writes Suzanne Ruta in The New York Times.

[14] Only through his relationship with Hanna can Michael get well; Franklin interprets that to mean that "postwar Germany is sick, and it can begin to heal only through its encounter with the Nazi past.

"[3] Richard Bernstein of the New York Times also notes that "In some sense, perhaps, Hanna can be seen to stand in for the larger German quandary of remembrance and atonement," but prefers not to read the novel as an allegory.

"[19] about whether she should have left her job at Siemens and taken the guard position, her question indicates that she does not know that she could have acted differently,[5] and her statement that there was "no alternative" claims a lack of moral responsibility.

He feels a difficult identification with the victims when he learns that Hanna often picked one prisoner to read to her, as she chose him later on, only to send that girl to Auschwitz and the gas chamber after several months.

The setting of this love story takes places in postwar Germany, specifically the 1960s, right when children started asking, "Daddy, what'd you do in the war?".

Through the study of history and memory comparison the German term, "Vergangenheitsbewältigung (VGB)", has emerged in literary publishings and is defined as "overcoming the past[24]".

The protagonist, Michael Berg, is faced with the predicament where it comes to light that the woman he once loved had an intimate role in the horrid actions of the Holocaust and struggles with his post memory.

"[15] While finding the ending too abrupt, Suzanne Ruta said in the New York Times Book Review that "daring fusion of 19th-century post-romantic, post-fairy-tale models with the awful history of the 20th century makes for a moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful work.

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Jeremy Adler accused him of "cultural pornography" and said the novel simplifies history and compels its readers to identify with the perpetrators.

[31] In the English-speaking world, Frederic Raphael wrote that no one could recommend the book "without having a tin ear for fiction and a blind eye for evil.

"[32] Ron Rosenbaum, criticizing the film adaptation of The Reader, wrote that even if Germans like Hanna were metaphorically "illiterate", "they could have heard it from Hitler's mouth in his infamous 1939 radio broadcast to Germany and the world, threatening extermination of the Jews if war started.

"[13] (This refers to the January 30, 1939 statement to the Reichstag,[33] later deliberately misdated to 1 September 1939[34]) Cynthia Ozick, in Commentary, called it a "product, conscious or not, of a desire to divert (attention) from the culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for Kultur.